Western short-sighted invasion to blame for Libya chaos, lawlessness

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

An increase in crime in Libya, a destroyed economy, and the lack of political control over different tribes makes Libya worse off than 2 years ago, as October marks the death of Colonel Gaddafi, journalist Neil Clark has told RT.

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan spent several hours in captivity
on Thursday after a 'former rebel' militia kidnapped him from a
Tripoli hotel in retaliation for his apparent cooperation with a
US anti-terror raid.

The event, Clark argues, highlights the complete chaos that exits
in Libya since the 2011 Western intervention.

RT:There are conflicting reports about this abduction
and the release - is it possible to cut through the spin at this
point?
Neil Clark: It has been very hard to find out what has been
going on. It is quite a farcical when we think that we’ve got the
Prime Minister of Libya that has been captured and abducted by a
rebel militia that are actually aligned to the government itself
and claim that they were acting under the orders of another
government’s department. But I think it shows and sort of
highlights the complete chaos in Libya at the moment, in fact the
chaos that exits in Libya since 2011. And while we can say it’s
farcical and also quite humorous really, I think for the Libyan
people living in this situation is quite terrible.

RT:How deep is the divide between Libya's armed
militias?

NC: I think that they are very divided. What kept these
militias groups together in 2011 was the opposition to the rule
of Colonel Gaddafi. They are very disparate group. They came
together to topple Colonel Gaddafi with Western help, but since
then they have been fighting over the spoils of victory. There is
nothing there to bring them together. Libya is a very divided
society along tribal lines. The fact of the matter is that
Gaddafi for all his crimes and all his sins, did hold the country
together from 1969-2011. There has been vacuum since the fall of
Gaddafi. We’ve got lawlessness in Libya, we got chaos, we got 500
percent increase in the murder rate. The government is not in
control of the country. Militias are in control of large areas of
the country and trying to get these militias working together is
going to be impossible.

RT:Why have they not been integrated back into society
two years since the revolution?

NC: We have to look at the Libyan society. The fact is
that Gaddafi, as I’ve said, did hold the country together. It is
a very, very hard country to hold together because it is divided
along tribal lines. Yes he was a dictator but he did hold the
country together and for Libyans it meant a possibility of living
decent lives in the Gaddafi era. Unfortunately since then, we’ve
had this power vacuum and I think to expect these very different
groups to work together without a strong, unified leader as
Gaddafi was, it would be very, very hard. I’m not saying that
Libya needs a new dictator at all, I’d like to see more democracy
in Libya but the responsibility for this chaos must lie with the
Western powers who toppled Gaddafi without really having a firm
plan on what was going to happen afterwards. We have seen this in
every country that the West has intervened to topple the
government. We have seen this in Iraq – 6,000 people alone killed
this year in Iraq. We have seen it in Afghanistan with the
ongoing war there and we had over 100,000 people killed in Syria
in the last two years. That was due to a different type of
Western intervention by packing proxy militia who is trying to
topple the government there. The chaos and the lawlessness in
Libya and the prime responsibility must lie with the NATO powers
who helping toppling Gaddafi in 2011.

RT:When Prime Minister Zeidan was released, Britain's
Foreign Secretary said "We will work with the Libyan government
on ensuring the transition remains on track and insecurities are
addressed". Can the Libyan government address anything at this
point?

NC: Things are worse now in October 2013 then they were
last year or two years ago. Much worse, because as I’ve said the
crime rate is rising, 500 percent increase in the murder rate,
you’ve got lawlessness in all parts of the country, the whole
production has seized in large amount. We’ve got a real economic
crisis in Libya. Libya is going backwards, it is not going
forwards. So for William Hague to come out and claim he wants to
take the Libyan transition forward, well where has he been? The
fact is that Libya is going backwards at a fast rate. I only fear
what will happen in the next few years? I do not see any end in
sight to this.